Mobile App Design Fundamentals – The Difference Between UI and UX!

Mobile App Design Fundamentals- The Basic Difference between UI and UX

The most popular and successful mobile applications have some substance behind them. If any company’s mobile app succeeds to attract and engage users, than it is so obvious that they have the potential to build a long lasting relationship. To turn one’s first time visitors into their long term loyal users, it should be important that an app must have something that user’s value. But if any company’s mobile application is not proven helpful, useful, or has poor usability, it will surely result in a negative direction.

Getting the application design fundamentals in a right direction is no longer a differentiating factor. And to get the element right, you firstly need to clearly understand them. For example- UI and UX are often misunderstood or confused with one another by business and developers alike.

Understanding the difference between UI v/s UX

Many newbie designers often misunderstood the terms UI and UX to mean the same thing. The first main and important step to creating a winning app is to understand the basic difference between two-

USER EXPERIENCE (UX)

The main root of every successful product is its ability to satisfy its end user. Regardless of the fact, how great you think your solution is, if your users are not satisfied with it, it will bring negative result only. And this is the main philosophy or principle behind user experience.

UX, or user experienced, can be defined as a process of improving user’s satisfaction level for the product or app. And this can only be achieved by boosting the accessibility, usability, and the overall performance of the app. Overall, the whole idea is that user must feel pleased when interacting with your solution.

USER INTERFACE (UI):

User Interface or UI usually revolves around the usability of an application. A solution with a great UI will be one that is highly user friendly and has features of an efficient interface. Another common misconception that people usually have about the UI is that it only about the development of navigation menus and buttons. However, talking about reality it is much more complex than this.

UI generally includes all interactions that usually happen between the app and the user.

ELEMENTS OF A SMOOTH UI DESIGN:

Just like an illustrative UX, an application needs a smooth UI design for its success. But if we talk about UI design, here are the following factors that matters the most-

1. Clarity: Design elements, Visuals and language should be used to make an application as clear as possible. One of the main benefits of it is that applications with good UI don’t require any lengthy on boarding.

2. Familiarity: For every product, and in our case for every application, users have their own mind set or we can say own mental models about how they wanted or expected things to be.

3. Responsiveness: An important part of UI design is the responsiveness of an application. The ideal or successful app should not lag or crash. Because if it may start happening there might be chances that user will uninstall the app as it constantly crashes or show errors.

4. Consistency: You should keep this point in mind to create a standard interface template and also need to follow it throughout the app. This will help users to learn the interface easily and then apply their knowledge while interacting with different elements of the app.

Here, there is one of the important benefits of being consistent that it will further satisfy consumers since people will prefer interacting with visually pleasing apps.

The Main Difference between UI and UX:

While on the one hand, UI consists of technical elements that allow users to interact with the application on the other hand, UX revolves around the overall perception which user gets away about the experience with the app.

Apart from the basic differences, there are many way in which UI and UX differs from other. Following below are the differences here-

UI just only focuses on the performance of the app while on the other hand UX focuses on the entire user journey.

UI only tell about how the app will going to look like, while UX indicates about what the problem and how will it solve in the users life.

UI usually includes its focus over visually directing the user about the app interface, while on the other hand, UX includes researching, testing, developing, and prototyping the app.

UI unlike UX is limited to the screen. UX usually exceed beyond it and involves all interactions and touch points with a user.

The Overlap: The main reason why commonly people thought UX and UI synonymous as with one another is that quality of apps they must include both. And in fact without proper UI, UX will automatically compromise.

But this is why?

This is because while interacting with an app, users expect to have the platform which should be user friendly and at the same time efficient to conduct the experience smooth and convenient.